I feel like they are right to highlight the dangers of plutocracy, but overlook the manner in which Trump's populist posturing makes it possible for him to politically benefit from the discontent he causes.
I also think extreme inequality is suboptimal from an economic standpoint as well. Poor people are more likely to spend than rich people because they need to spend, and spending has a multiplier effect. Rich people can spend as well and prop up the economy a bit, but don't need to and can sit on their wealth if they choose to or get nervous about growing risks.
A highly unequal economy also forecloses on Fordism and making products the broader public can afford as a business model. I think Anthropetic might be better positioned to weather an AI bubble than OpenAI for this reason.
The economy is very strange right now and could be worse. However, I think it is a bad sign that graduates are struggling to find entry-level jobs.
The ultra-rich don't care about the economy, they only care about seeing their own wealth numbers go up. If that means the other 99.999% of humanity has to become poorer and suffer more, then that is acceptable to the ultra-rich.
Currently it seems like the things they are planning will actively damage the economy for 90% of people. Basically, the plan to take away jobs from hundreds of millions of people, and give the wages to a few tech companies in California. If it works, it will create an economic crisis the likes of which we have never seen before. But the billionaires don't care, their only interest is getting more money, and more power.
Also the things that poor people spend their money on tend to be more productive for society as a whole (food, housing, transportation), than the things the super rich spend their money on (yachts).
the consumption of a single poor person has a multiplier effect on the economy - money isn't just spent once. A poor person spending an extra x amount of money in the economy is better than a wealthy person investing the same amount
a booming economy makes investment safer as there are more potential customers/potential growth. we don't need VC firms owned by billionaires to make money for investment available.
I assume that for investment to have a multiplier effect, it would come from the companies that receive the investment spending money on employees, equipment, and services from other companies. I'll leave it to professional economists to properly measure what type of spending has the biggest impact through creating more spending and having a ripple effect through the economy. I imagine it is a tricky and difficult thing to do.
I swear Greece was screwed over from the IMF economist handling the case undercounting the multipler effect when they needed the bailout that mostly went into the pockets of German companies. At least he admitted to making the mistake. Most people these days don't even have the decency to do that.
What you are describing conveys my understanding of the multiplier effect. The widget example is irrelevant. It's not about what happens to the widget. It's about what happens to the money that the person making the widget has now received. What does he spend it on? Pizza? What is important is not that the pizza gets consumed but that the Pizza man now has more money to spend. What does he spend it on? A knife? Now the restaurant equipment wholesaler has more money to spend etc.
The vast majority of money that the poor receive gets put back into the local economy. The wealthy CAN invest it, if they feel like it, often into things like housing, which drives up house prices and makes poor people (anyone earning under $500k per year) even more poor.
I haven't heard that before, but I haven't taken more than a couple of basic economic classes. My intuition would be that each dollar spent in investment would be the same as dollars spent in consumption. I am open to the idea that dollars spent in investment might indeed be superior to dollars spent on consumption due to the fact that investment spending is more likely to lead to innovation, but I wouldn't expect something like innovation to be incorporated into the multipler effect statistic. But you may have more knowledge of how these things actually work than I do.
It isn't the investing which creates growth, it's the operations of the factory, which is inextricably tied to the workers' daily labor. The mechanical action of "investing" is nothing more than a claim to titleship and, hence, profits.
The fact that startup capital is needed to begin an expensive operation at scale also does not require us to seek out private capitalist 'investors' for such capital. There are many different ways to fund an entrepreneurial venture, and the fact that we default to a single one is both a detriment to the economy - waiting for benevolent rich people to begin productive work - but also to communities and society - constraining ventures only to what a relatively small class of rich people prioritize restricts thought and creative solutions to other problems.
You clearly didn't read my comment. Startup capital is required. It doesn't need to come personally from individual rich people. Lots of ways to raise capital that is nearly impossible wirh our global financial system.
Mainstream economics texts do not spell out the inherent tendency in our economy to concentrate wealth. Nor that there is no reason at all why the economy should run at a level that provides full employment, and insomuch as new jobs are created by consumption growth, they come at the expense of destroying the environment.
Yes, market economies are good at generating lots of stuff ... but they are at the same time, the drivers of environmental destruction and insecure livelihoods. The continuous stream of new products also has negative consequences for our physical and psychological health. And they concentrate wealth.
That's why economics needs re-writing ... ideally by biologists, ecologists, physicists and engineers, because it must start from the basis of our dependency on the natural world and the limitations of living on a finite planet.
Agreed. Mainstream economic textbooks are fundamentally flawed. One of the first things I learned at uni was that "perfectly competitive markets maximize social surplus". This is true given one essential, often-overlooked assumption: a just distribution of purchasing power. Without it, a starving person could go without food while a rich person buys food they don't need. This is what has happened in almost every famine in modern history, for example.
It is not only economics, the political system itself is designed to enrich the ruling clasess. A person can enter the politics and easily in several years enter the top 1% wealth bracket and start preaching about nasty billionares. Truth is they dont want equality or help the poor but to become billionares themselves.
> That's why economics needs re-writing ... ideally by biologists, ecologists, physicists and engineers
This is absurd : rewriting economics books is not gonna change how we consume and process resources, anymore than rewriting physics books will change the law of gravity. Economics is here to study reality, you won't change reality by rewriting the books.
Also economics is a very different science than biology, physics or engineering. It's a social science, and a engineer is equally ill-suited to do economics as he is to do any other social sciences. For ex every engineer that shows up in an economic debates starts throwing the "infinite growth in a finite worth is impossible" because they think the second law of thermodynamics applies to GDP. Spoiler alert: it does not, and they'd know that if they had taken an Econ 101 class (or really just basic accounting)
> but they are at the same time, the drivers of environmental destruction and insecure livelihoods. The continuous stream of new products also has negative consequences for our physical and psychological health
I do not understand why you think this requires a rewriting of economics, since these effects are extremely well-studied within economics and appear in every mainstream economic text.
Hell, you will probably cover this in your very first undergraduate class in ~4th week or so; it is an extremely natural segue from basic supply & demand laws into externalities (and similar stuff like deadweight loss).
Start here and branch out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
>And they concentrate wealth.
You will have to clarify what a re-writing of economics would entail in your mind that would address this.
Economics absolutely covers the concentration of wealth. This is why if you read reports from economic bureaus, they will break down income, consumption, asset holdings, etc. by income/net worth level.
What economics typically does not embed in its theory is a normative component. Economics exists to give you the tools to describe the consolidation of wealth, but the argument of whether this is good or bad (or whether the processes that lead to it are worth its costs) are left to moral and political theory.
There are of course many works that cover both economic and moral/political theory and synthesise the two, and it is very common in particular to see utilitarianism shoehorned into economics because it's inherently quantitative in aspiration. But the foundations of economics are deliberately amoral in order to try and remain an objective mathematical approach.
I do not see what having other STEM specialists rewrite economics would do to change this, and I don't even see why you would want it to be changed.
It sounds to me like what you actually want is a politics and market that makes different economic choices. That does not mean that economics as a science needs to be rewritten. It is not the science or mathematical framework of economics leading to those outcomes, it is the moral, political, policy, and consumption choices we make.
Economics is literally the study of how to allocate limited resources when there's unlimited demand. The problem lies with politicians and interest groups cherry-picking data or manipulating it in some manner for their own gain.
I do agree that businesses far too often don't account for the destruction they cause. But again, these issues are solvable by a government. Not by economists.
Thanks for the comment. I feel that a definition of economics as restricted as that you give is rather limiting. Surely the aim is to understand how the economy works, and that depends enormously on the rules that govern it: a modern free-market economy works very differently to a soviet planned economy or a medieval economy.
Also politicians very much do justify their actions based on the opinions of economists. Consider the influence of Keynes post WW2, or Milton Friedman on Thatcher and Reagan. Neo-liberal economics is used to justify minimum government and that most issues should not be 'solved by government' but rather left to the market.
> In a report timed for the opening of the World Economic Forum in Davos, the charity said the fortunes of global billionaires jumped 16% in 2025 to $18.3 trillion, extending an 81% rise since 2020.
How is it inflation-adjusted?
Because rising prices would increase both the nominal wealth of each billionaire and the number of billionaires...
Why not deduce this yourself? Inflation YoY was around 2.6% and since 2020 around 20%.
Their wealth increased more than 6x that 2.6% in 1 year and 4x the 20% over 5 years.
Their wealth increased 6 and 4 times more than the rate of inflation over the given timeframe.
Another way to look at it: Did you get a 16% raise this year and an 81% one since 2020? How many do you think did? I can assure you this wasn't the case for most. You're welcome to check.
Wages are not out-pacing inflation by 6 and 4x, like they are for billionaires. If they were, billionaires would be whining about inequality instead of the poor and what remains of the middle class - and not nearly enough of them do, thanks to the rich controlling most major new sources and politicians.
Can't do it without knowing the number and wealth of people that had wealth slightly below 1 billion in 2024 that became billionaires in 2025...
I.e. if you had one guy with wealth $1.1b in 2024 and 3 guys with wealth $0.99b, 2.6% inflation would result in 300% increase in the total wealth of the billionaires.
I assume a reputable institution like Oxfam adjusts for inflation in their study. It would be hard to take them seriously if they didn't, but I haven't personally investigated the study.
If anything, I would think inflation would reduce inequality by reducing the value of monetary wealth itself and would therefore have more of an impact on people who have more wealth (measurement wise, of course, their absolute wealth is so great they wouldn't notice the reduced value as much as us on a personal level). I think I remember a quote from James Cameron that Titanic made more than the first Avatar movie adjusted for inflation (undermining the commercial talking point for his own movie.) But I trust Oxfam to be more serious than a Hollywood media campaign.
Yeah, reputable orgs usually account for inflation, so the numbers are likely solid. The Cameron example is a good illustration.. adjusted figures can tell a different story.
Reputable? We are talking about an org that counts a fresh Harvard Business School graduate with student debt as part of the "world's poorest" and uses cherry picked data to advance their agenda (such as "billionaire wealth has increased X% since Y" where Y turns out to the bottom of the stock market...)
Oxfam is as reputable as any political party, they have an agenda to sell and you should take their studies with a boulder of salt.
There are a thousand HBS grads a year. Even if you do count them and every other top MBA grad as the world's poorest, it's still a rounding error. It's not going to impact anything.
There are a lot of people with negative equity in rich countries. Adding them up to poor people in poor countries inflates poverty averages just as much as adding billionaires to upper class grossly inflates upper class wealth average.
In a previous reports Oxfam claimed that 22% of Americans are in the world's 10% poorest. Which is grotesque and only possible because of Americans with no or negative equity, people that are poor on paper but certainly not actually living the same life as homeless beggars in Bangladesh or Sudan.
The basic math doesn't add up here. Adding a thousand 29 year old harvard grads with negative equity doesn't move the numbers when millions are in poverty in the US.
Adding a few hundred billionaires who own the majority of the wealth in the country on the other hand does. Then again, this is why you're supposed to use medians rather than averages.
So was mine, dude. All of those examples are rounding errors. You're grossly underestimating the number of poor people around here. It doesn't matter if some people with high earning potential but low net worth are added, they're literal rounding errors.
They are not. A quarter of Americans are underwater on their car loan for example. 40 millions of them have student loans. These are not rounding errors.
The American consumer is not yet stressed enough for significant economic change to occur. How did we get the new deal? Social security? Unemployment insurance? Because billionaires gave it to us out of the goodness of their hearts? No! Because the middle class was so bereft during the Depression the mass of people held their government accountable. The AFL-CIO was instrumental in lobbying President Roosevelt
America has already had a socialist revolution. That occurred during the New Deal. It was not a communist revolution, but certainly a socialist revolution. Reagan had a different economic narrative
There's some good history about how single payer was not included in the New Deal because of intense lobbying from the industry that FDR feared would derail the whole Social Security Act. They left Single-Payer healthcare out of the New Deal, and to this day we have graveyards filled with bones of patients that were not profitable for insurance companies to treat
Not to undermine the point of the article or anything, but billionaire wealth will hit a “record high” most years, as does wealth for all of us, because capital tends to grow over time. It just seems like a moot point
>"Actions of the Trump presidency including the championing of deregulation and undermining agreements to increase corporate taxation have benefited the richest around the world," Oxfam said.
A bit of an odd argument, as the OECD corporate tax deal is projected to lose the US tax revenue. You can’t really hold it against us not to advocate for policies that directly harm our country
> Not to undermine the point of the article or anything, but billionaire wealth will hit a “record high” most years, as does wealth for all of us, because capital tends to grow over time. It just seems like a moot point
The fact that you get massively downvoted for pointing something so obviously correct is what's wrong with this sub: a bunch of people with no understanding of economics treating it as a political/news sub and not actually discussing economics :(
You know what else grows with our “wealth”? The debt we owe nature. Externalities are coming for us and there’s nowhere to hide. Look at every metric related to the planetary boundaries if you want to see the other side of this “wealth” story. And to any doubters, just look at insurance markets. Ironically enough it will be capitalism that hangs itself but unfortunately it also means the rest of the living world will have to perish as well.
The phrase you're looking for is inflation adjusted, and I wrote about this above.
Their wealth increase over 1 year was 6x the inflation rate, and 4x over the 5 year period.
Inequality also harms countries. You don't seem to understand, like most in the US, how extreme it's become here. Billionaires controlling every major news source probably has a lot to do with that. Consider that their interests aren't the same as yours. That's certainly the case for most.
Oxfam studies are heavily biased and full of cherry picking and should not be taken seriously, at least not anymore than any other politically motivated think tank trying to sell you on their narrative.
(I would link to some article but the mods have banned substack so here we are)
Edit: Google "Noahpinion Oxfam" if you are interested
They aren't the only people doing studies on wealth, you know, and you've done nothing to dispute their claims. Ad hominem attacks do work on the gullible and lazy though, so nice try I guess.
You're arguing with people who understand math and data here. I hope you're not seriously trying to argue inequaliity isn't worsening, when every metric available, even by the Federal Reserve's own data shows that it is.
Concentrated power and fewer choices are oppressive and unpopular. There is a reason we got rid of kings, aspire to break up monopolies, and make platitudes about progressive taxing. Extreme unbalanced power is regressive social and economic policy. We've been captured and corrupted politically by selfish and morally bankrupt people.
> They aren't the only people doing studies on wealth
Sure, but this is the one about Oxfam here
> and you've done nothing to dispute their claims
I have, read my other comments on this post.
> You're arguing with people who understand math and data here
I am arguing with exactly two people here so far, one of them being you. The other one couldn't figure out the difference between an example with Harvard and general case. Where are these people arguing with me that "understand maths and data"? Also what makes you think I don't know "maths and data"?
> I hope you're not seriously trying to argue inequaliity isn't worsening
I am arguing that Oxfam numbers are shit, which they are. I have pointed out already two cases of obvious bad methodology along with a source explaining in detail why Oxfam numbers are crap, nobody (you included) has actually addressed anything so far.
Adventurous_Lunch_35 | a month ago
I feel like they are right to highlight the dangers of plutocracy, but overlook the manner in which Trump's populist posturing makes it possible for him to politically benefit from the discontent he causes.
I also think extreme inequality is suboptimal from an economic standpoint as well. Poor people are more likely to spend than rich people because they need to spend, and spending has a multiplier effect. Rich people can spend as well and prop up the economy a bit, but don't need to and can sit on their wealth if they choose to or get nervous about growing risks.
A highly unequal economy also forecloses on Fordism and making products the broader public can afford as a business model. I think Anthropetic might be better positioned to weather an AI bubble than OpenAI for this reason.
The economy is very strange right now and could be worse. However, I think it is a bad sign that graduates are struggling to find entry-level jobs.
cultish_alibi | a month ago
The ultra-rich don't care about the economy, they only care about seeing their own wealth numbers go up. If that means the other 99.999% of humanity has to become poorer and suffer more, then that is acceptable to the ultra-rich.
Currently it seems like the things they are planning will actively damage the economy for 90% of people. Basically, the plan to take away jobs from hundreds of millions of people, and give the wages to a few tech companies in California. If it works, it will create an economic crisis the likes of which we have never seen before. But the billionaires don't care, their only interest is getting more money, and more power.
bmc2 | a month ago
Also the things that poor people spend their money on tend to be more productive for society as a whole (food, housing, transportation), than the things the super rich spend their money on (yachts).
FearlessPark4588 | a month ago
Wealthy people can invest, which has a multiplier effect larger than the consumption of a single poor person.
andtheniansaid | a month ago
the consumption of a single poor person has a multiplier effect on the economy - money isn't just spent once. A poor person spending an extra x amount of money in the economy is better than a wealthy person investing the same amount
a booming economy makes investment safer as there are more potential customers/potential growth. we don't need VC firms owned by billionaires to make money for investment available.
Adventurous_Lunch_35 | a month ago
I assume that for investment to have a multiplier effect, it would come from the companies that receive the investment spending money on employees, equipment, and services from other companies. I'll leave it to professional economists to properly measure what type of spending has the biggest impact through creating more spending and having a ripple effect through the economy. I imagine it is a tricky and difficult thing to do.
I swear Greece was screwed over from the IMF economist handling the case undercounting the multipler effect when they needed the bailout that mostly went into the pockets of German companies. At least he admitted to making the mistake. Most people these days don't even have the decency to do that.
Adventurous_Lunch_35 | a month ago
What you are describing conveys my understanding of the multiplier effect. The widget example is irrelevant. It's not about what happens to the widget. It's about what happens to the money that the person making the widget has now received. What does he spend it on? Pizza? What is important is not that the pizza gets consumed but that the Pizza man now has more money to spend. What does he spend it on? A knife? Now the restaurant equipment wholesaler has more money to spend etc.
cultish_alibi | a month ago
The vast majority of money that the poor receive gets put back into the local economy. The wealthy CAN invest it, if they feel like it, often into things like housing, which drives up house prices and makes poor people (anyone earning under $500k per year) even more poor.
Paradoxjjw | a month ago
Those investments don't mean shit without consumers that can buy the products of the ventures they invest in
Adventurous_Lunch_35 | a month ago
I haven't heard that before, but I haven't taken more than a couple of basic economic classes. My intuition would be that each dollar spent in investment would be the same as dollars spent in consumption. I am open to the idea that dollars spent in investment might indeed be superior to dollars spent on consumption due to the fact that investment spending is more likely to lead to innovation, but I wouldn't expect something like innovation to be incorporated into the multipler effect statistic. But you may have more knowledge of how these things actually work than I do.
FearlessPark4588 | a month ago
Well if you invest in say a widget factory you can make a lot more widgets than just that one-time consumption so it creates growth.
Raise_A_Thoth | a month ago
It isn't the investing which creates growth, it's the operations of the factory, which is inextricably tied to the workers' daily labor. The mechanical action of "investing" is nothing more than a claim to titleship and, hence, profits.
The fact that startup capital is needed to begin an expensive operation at scale also does not require us to seek out private capitalist 'investors' for such capital. There are many different ways to fund an entrepreneurial venture, and the fact that we default to a single one is both a detriment to the economy - waiting for benevolent rich people to begin productive work - but also to communities and society - constraining ventures only to what a relatively small class of rich people prioritize restricts thought and creative solutions to other problems.
FearlessPark4588 | a month ago
How is the poor laborer going to be productive without the factory? Will you have them produce the widgets by hand at 1/1000th the speed?
Raise_A_Thoth | a month ago
You clearly didn't read my comment. Startup capital is required. It doesn't need to come personally from individual rich people. Lots of ways to raise capital that is nearly impossible wirh our global financial system.
FearlessPark4588 | a month ago
What do you think 'startup capital' is?
Raise_A_Thoth | a month ago
It's money. I know what money is. Do you think pools of money only comes from rich people? Like they are some kind of font or spring of capital?
Paradoxjjw | a month ago
Who is going to buy the widgets if people don't have money to consume? Bill Gates isn't going to consume 10 million widgets.
Gold-Loan3142 | a month ago
Mainstream economics texts do not spell out the inherent tendency in our economy to concentrate wealth. Nor that there is no reason at all why the economy should run at a level that provides full employment, and insomuch as new jobs are created by consumption growth, they come at the expense of destroying the environment.
Yes, market economies are good at generating lots of stuff ... but they are at the same time, the drivers of environmental destruction and insecure livelihoods. The continuous stream of new products also has negative consequences for our physical and psychological health. And they concentrate wealth.
That's why economics needs re-writing ... ideally by biologists, ecologists, physicists and engineers, because it must start from the basis of our dependency on the natural world and the limitations of living on a finite planet.
PedanticSatiation | a month ago
Agreed. Mainstream economic textbooks are fundamentally flawed. One of the first things I learned at uni was that "perfectly competitive markets maximize social surplus". This is true given one essential, often-overlooked assumption: a just distribution of purchasing power. Without it, a starving person could go without food while a rich person buys food they don't need. This is what has happened in almost every famine in modern history, for example.
kkapulic | a month ago
It is not only economics, the political system itself is designed to enrich the ruling clasess. A person can enter the politics and easily in several years enter the top 1% wealth bracket and start preaching about nasty billionares. Truth is they dont want equality or help the poor but to become billionares themselves.
bitflag | a month ago
> That's why economics needs re-writing ... ideally by biologists, ecologists, physicists and engineers
This is absurd : rewriting economics books is not gonna change how we consume and process resources, anymore than rewriting physics books will change the law of gravity. Economics is here to study reality, you won't change reality by rewriting the books.
Also economics is a very different science than biology, physics or engineering. It's a social science, and a engineer is equally ill-suited to do economics as he is to do any other social sciences. For ex every engineer that shows up in an economic debates starts throwing the "infinite growth in a finite worth is impossible" because they think the second law of thermodynamics applies to GDP. Spoiler alert: it does not, and they'd know that if they had taken an Econ 101 class (or really just basic accounting)
FidgetyHerbalism | a month ago
> but they are at the same time, the drivers of environmental destruction and insecure livelihoods. The continuous stream of new products also has negative consequences for our physical and psychological health
I do not understand why you think this requires a rewriting of economics, since these effects are extremely well-studied within economics and appear in every mainstream economic text.
Hell, you will probably cover this in your very first undergraduate class in ~4th week or so; it is an extremely natural segue from basic supply & demand laws into externalities (and similar stuff like deadweight loss).
Start here and branch out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
>And they concentrate wealth.
You will have to clarify what a re-writing of economics would entail in your mind that would address this.
Economics absolutely covers the concentration of wealth. This is why if you read reports from economic bureaus, they will break down income, consumption, asset holdings, etc. by income/net worth level.
What economics typically does not embed in its theory is a normative component. Economics exists to give you the tools to describe the consolidation of wealth, but the argument of whether this is good or bad (or whether the processes that lead to it are worth its costs) are left to moral and political theory.
There are of course many works that cover both economic and moral/political theory and synthesise the two, and it is very common in particular to see utilitarianism shoehorned into economics because it's inherently quantitative in aspiration. But the foundations of economics are deliberately amoral in order to try and remain an objective mathematical approach.
I do not see what having other STEM specialists rewrite economics would do to change this, and I don't even see why you would want it to be changed.
It sounds to me like what you actually want is a politics and market that makes different economic choices. That does not mean that economics as a science needs to be rewritten. It is not the science or mathematical framework of economics leading to those outcomes, it is the moral, political, policy, and consumption choices we make.
teshh | a month ago
Economics is literally the study of how to allocate limited resources when there's unlimited demand. The problem lies with politicians and interest groups cherry-picking data or manipulating it in some manner for their own gain.
I do agree that businesses far too often don't account for the destruction they cause. But again, these issues are solvable by a government. Not by economists.
Gold-Loan3142 | a month ago
Thanks for the comment. I feel that a definition of economics as restricted as that you give is rather limiting. Surely the aim is to understand how the economy works, and that depends enormously on the rules that govern it: a modern free-market economy works very differently to a soviet planned economy or a medieval economy.
Also politicians very much do justify their actions based on the opinions of economists. Consider the influence of Keynes post WW2, or Milton Friedman on Thatcher and Reagan. Neo-liberal economics is used to justify minimum government and that most issues should not be 'solved by government' but rather left to the market.
Ateist | a month ago
> In a report timed for the opening of the World Economic Forum in Davos, the charity said the fortunes of global billionaires jumped 16% in 2025 to $18.3 trillion, extending an 81% rise since 2020.
How is it inflation-adjusted?
Because rising prices would increase both the nominal wealth of each billionaire and the number of billionaires...
h4ms4ndwich11 | a month ago
Why not deduce this yourself? Inflation YoY was around 2.6% and since 2020 around 20%.
Their wealth increased more than 6x that 2.6% in 1 year and 4x the 20% over 5 years.
Their wealth increased 6 and 4 times more than the rate of inflation over the given timeframe.
Another way to look at it: Did you get a 16% raise this year and an 81% one since 2020? How many do you think did? I can assure you this wasn't the case for most. You're welcome to check.
Wages are not out-pacing inflation by 6 and 4x, like they are for billionaires. If they were, billionaires would be whining about inequality instead of the poor and what remains of the middle class - and not nearly enough of them do, thanks to the rich controlling most major new sources and politicians.
Ateist | a month ago
Can't do it without knowing the number and wealth of people that had wealth slightly below 1 billion in 2024 that became billionaires in 2025...
I.e. if you had one guy with wealth $1.1b in 2024 and 3 guys with wealth $0.99b, 2.6% inflation would result in 300% increase in the total wealth of the billionaires.
Adventurous_Lunch_35 | a month ago
I assume a reputable institution like Oxfam adjusts for inflation in their study. It would be hard to take them seriously if they didn't, but I haven't personally investigated the study.
If anything, I would think inflation would reduce inequality by reducing the value of monetary wealth itself and would therefore have more of an impact on people who have more wealth (measurement wise, of course, their absolute wealth is so great they wouldn't notice the reduced value as much as us on a personal level). I think I remember a quote from James Cameron that Titanic made more than the first Avatar movie adjusted for inflation (undermining the commercial talking point for his own movie.) But I trust Oxfam to be more serious than a Hollywood media campaign.
SpaceKalien | a month ago
Yeah, reputable orgs usually account for inflation, so the numbers are likely solid. The Cameron example is a good illustration.. adjusted figures can tell a different story.
bitflag | a month ago
Reputable? We are talking about an org that counts a fresh Harvard Business School graduate with student debt as part of the "world's poorest" and uses cherry picked data to advance their agenda (such as "billionaire wealth has increased X% since Y" where Y turns out to the bottom of the stock market...)
Oxfam is as reputable as any political party, they have an agenda to sell and you should take their studies with a boulder of salt.
bmc2 | a month ago
There are a thousand HBS grads a year. Even if you do count them and every other top MBA grad as the world's poorest, it's still a rounding error. It's not going to impact anything.
bitflag | a month ago
There are a lot of people with negative equity in rich countries. Adding them up to poor people in poor countries inflates poverty averages just as much as adding billionaires to upper class grossly inflates upper class wealth average.
In a previous reports Oxfam claimed that 22% of Americans are in the world's 10% poorest. Which is grotesque and only possible because of Americans with no or negative equity, people that are poor on paper but certainly not actually living the same life as homeless beggars in Bangladesh or Sudan.
bmc2 | a month ago
The basic math doesn't add up here. Adding a thousand 29 year old harvard grads with negative equity doesn't move the numbers when millions are in poverty in the US.
Adding a few hundred billionaires who own the majority of the wealth in the country on the other hand does. Then again, this is why you're supposed to use medians rather than averages.
bitflag | a month ago
> Adding a thousand 29 year old harvard grads
... That was an example dude. There are more than fresh Harvard grads who are in negative equity obviously.
bmc2 | a month ago
So was mine, dude. All of those examples are rounding errors. You're grossly underestimating the number of poor people around here. It doesn't matter if some people with high earning potential but low net worth are added, they're literal rounding errors.
bitflag | a month ago
> All of those examples are rounding errors
They are not. A quarter of Americans are underwater on their car loan for example. 40 millions of them have student loans. These are not rounding errors.
bmc2 | a month ago
You're purposely missing the entire point here. We're done.
neo2551 | a month ago
Oxfam has a lot of bias, I wouldn’t trust all their claims at face value.
Omarkhayyamsnotes | a month ago
The American consumer is not yet stressed enough for significant economic change to occur. How did we get the new deal? Social security? Unemployment insurance? Because billionaires gave it to us out of the goodness of their hearts? No! Because the middle class was so bereft during the Depression the mass of people held their government accountable. The AFL-CIO was instrumental in lobbying President Roosevelt
Omarkhayyamsnotes | a month ago
America has already had a socialist revolution. That occurred during the New Deal. It was not a communist revolution, but certainly a socialist revolution. Reagan had a different economic narrative
Omarkhayyamsnotes | a month ago
There's some good history about how single payer was not included in the New Deal because of intense lobbying from the industry that FDR feared would derail the whole Social Security Act. They left Single-Payer healthcare out of the New Deal, and to this day we have graveyards filled with bones of patients that were not profitable for insurance companies to treat
Obvious_Chapter2082 | a month ago
Not to undermine the point of the article or anything, but billionaire wealth will hit a “record high” most years, as does wealth for all of us, because capital tends to grow over time. It just seems like a moot point
>"Actions of the Trump presidency including the championing of deregulation and undermining agreements to increase corporate taxation have benefited the richest around the world," Oxfam said.
A bit of an odd argument, as the OECD corporate tax deal is projected to lose the US tax revenue. You can’t really hold it against us not to advocate for policies that directly harm our country
bobandgeorge | a month ago
Sure but
> It said US President Donald Trump’s policies helped boost billionaire wealth 16.2%
Did your wealth go up 16.2% last year? Good for you if so.
M0therN4ture | a month ago
He belongs to the corrupt top 1%.
bitflag | a month ago
> Did your wealth go up 16.2% last year? Good for you if so.
The S&P500 was up by 16.4%, so anybody with a stock portfolio/401K actually did. In the US 60% of Americans own stocks...
Obvious_Chapter2082 | a month ago
Mine went up like 25% last year
bitflag | a month ago
> Not to undermine the point of the article or anything, but billionaire wealth will hit a “record high” most years, as does wealth for all of us, because capital tends to grow over time. It just seems like a moot point
The fact that you get massively downvoted for pointing something so obviously correct is what's wrong with this sub: a bunch of people with no understanding of economics treating it as a political/news sub and not actually discussing economics :(
thehourglasses | a month ago
You know what else grows with our “wealth”? The debt we owe nature. Externalities are coming for us and there’s nowhere to hide. Look at every metric related to the planetary boundaries if you want to see the other side of this “wealth” story. And to any doubters, just look at insurance markets. Ironically enough it will be capitalism that hangs itself but unfortunately it also means the rest of the living world will have to perish as well.
h4ms4ndwich11 | a month ago
The phrase you're looking for is inflation adjusted, and I wrote about this above.
Their wealth increase over 1 year was 6x the inflation rate, and 4x over the 5 year period.
Inequality also harms countries. You don't seem to understand, like most in the US, how extreme it's become here. Billionaires controlling every major news source probably has a lot to do with that. Consider that their interests aren't the same as yours. That's certainly the case for most.
bitflag | a month ago
Oxfam studies are heavily biased and full of cherry picking and should not be taken seriously, at least not anymore than any other politically motivated think tank trying to sell you on their narrative.
(I would link to some article but the mods have banned substack so here we are)
Edit: Google "Noahpinion Oxfam" if you are interested
Djmies | a month ago
Could you elaborate? I have read that claim a few times now over the years on every oxfam wealth report.
bitflag | a month ago
Google "Noahpinion oxfam" since I can't link directly. There have been other articles but Noah's one is more extensive.
h4ms4ndwich11 | a month ago
They aren't the only people doing studies on wealth, you know, and you've done nothing to dispute their claims. Ad hominem attacks do work on the gullible and lazy though, so nice try I guess.
You're arguing with people who understand math and data here. I hope you're not seriously trying to argue inequaliity isn't worsening, when every metric available, even by the Federal Reserve's own data shows that it is.
Concentrated power and fewer choices are oppressive and unpopular. There is a reason we got rid of kings, aspire to break up monopolies, and make platitudes about progressive taxing. Extreme unbalanced power is regressive social and economic policy. We've been captured and corrupted politically by selfish and morally bankrupt people.
bitflag | a month ago
> They aren't the only people doing studies on wealth
Sure, but this is the one about Oxfam here
> and you've done nothing to dispute their claims
I have, read my other comments on this post.
> You're arguing with people who understand math and data here
I am arguing with exactly two people here so far, one of them being you. The other one couldn't figure out the difference between an example with Harvard and general case. Where are these people arguing with me that "understand maths and data"? Also what makes you think I don't know "maths and data"?
> I hope you're not seriously trying to argue inequaliity isn't worsening
I am arguing that Oxfam numbers are shit, which they are. I have pointed out already two cases of obvious bad methodology along with a source explaining in detail why Oxfam numbers are crap, nobody (you included) has actually addressed anything so far.